Showing posts with label cookie decorating. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cookie decorating. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 18, 2019

Teaching is hard.




Teaching is hard. No, wait. Let me rephrase that. Raising up twenty-seven 10- and 11-year-olds to be kind, responsible citizens is hard. Doing that makes adding and subtracting fractions with common denominators look like a piece of cake.

We make mistakes. (At least I do.) But hopefully, we also reflect, and talk to our unpaid counselors (brother, husband, friends), and come back the next day ready to do a better job.

This is year 36 for my tradition of making cookies for my class to decorate. And this year, I made the mistake of holding cooking decorating over their heads as if it is a reward for good behavior.

And it's not.

And it never has been.

Cookie decorating is a gift I give to my students. It's a gift of my talents and my heart. It has always been and always should be given with joy and love.

Like a parent, I must compartmentalize my disapproval of and frustration with a child's behavior, and my love for the child as a growing, learning young human. As an adult, I must model for my students how to criticize constructively while loving unconditionally.

I'll stop there, because I need to go iron my Pajama Day pajamas and get to work.


Monday, April 16, 2018

Cookies



We measure minds by their stature. It would be better to estimate them by their beauty.  ~Joseph Joubert 

Cookies

Remember the time we
decorated cookies? There was no unit of measure
for our joy that day. Who minds
learning by
mixing icing and food coloring to make their
cookie’s stature
more massive (and of course, more beautiful)? It
was about way more than just the cookies, though. Who would
believe that such a diverse group could be
unified at Christmas? No better
way than to
share a 34-year cookie decorating tradition. Don’t under-estimate
the power of cookies to overcome differences. Let them
heal the world by
their sweetness and by their
beauty.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2018



Friday, December 16, 2011

Poetry Friday -- Education



To David, About His Education
by Howard Nemerov

The world is full of mostly invisible things,
And there is no way but putting the mind's eye,
Or its nose, in a book, to find them out,
Things like the square root of Everest
Or how many times Byron goes into Texas,
Or whether the law of the excluded middle
Applies west of the Rockies. For these
And the like reasons, you have to go to school
And study books and listen to what you are told,
And sometimes try to remember.

Read the rest of the poem here, at The Writer's Almanac.

I struggle with the idea of keeping "the grand confusion of the world / Under (my) hat... / and teach(ing) small children to do this in their turn."

In my opinion, "the grand confusion of the world" is all of the good stuff in the world -- all the mystery and wonder and magic in the world. And instead of teaching my students to quantify and qualify and categorize all of their fresh amazement about this incredible world that is so new and wonderful to them, I try to teach them to savor learning, to even savor the feeling of learning. For example, we started long division yesterday, a particularly perfect time to teach a child to stay in a place of patience with themselves and the process, rather than giving up and feeling defeated on the first try. 

Here's another example. Yesterday, for the 28th time in my teaching career, we decorated cookies. And while it wasn't "the mean annual rainfall / On Plato's Republic," I do believe that what I teach in this afternoon spent away from papers and books and standards and curriculum is just as important: 

slow down, 
pay attention to the details, 
sing along to the music, 
share, cooperate, compromise, 
wash the spoon after you lick it, 
enjoy the one you made for yourself but 
make three times as many for others.



Kate has the Poetry Friday roundup this week at Book Aunt.